Related papers: Kelvin's clouds
On April 27, 1900, William Thomson, better known as Lord Kelvin, delivered a visionary speech before the Royal Institution of Great Britain. In it, he presented two unresolved problems which, to him, appeared fundamental and unavoidable at…
Towards the end of the 19th century, Kelvin pronounced as the "clouds of physics" 1) the failure of the Michelson-Morely experiment to detect an ether wind, 2) the violation of the classical mechanical equipartition theorem in statistical…
At the end of the 19th century light was regarded as an electromagnetic wave propagating in a material medium called ether. The speed c appearing in Maxwell's wave equations was the speed of light with respect to the ether. Therefore,…
There is a set of first-order differential equations for the curvature tensor in general relativity (the curvature equations or CEs for short) that are strikingly similar to the Maxwell equations of electrodynamics. This paper considers…
Physical science has changed in the century since Lord Kelvin's celebrated essay on Nineteenth Century Clouds over the Dynamical Theory of Heat and Light, but some things are the same. Analogs in what was happening in physics then and what…
Albert Einstein postulated the equivalence of energy and mass, developed the theory of special relativity, explained the photoelectric effect, and described Brownian motion in five papers, all published in 1905, 100 years ago. With these…
Physics was in crisis at the beginning of the twentieth century because the newborn Maxwell's electromagnetism defied mechanistic preconceptions. Albert Einstein understood that the solution to the crisis required an audacious reworking of…
This talk discusses the formation of primordial intermediate-mass black holes, in a double-inflationary theory, of sufficient abundance possibly to provide all of the cosmological dark matter. There follows my, hopefully convincing,…
The nature of space-time and surrounding matter objects was and persists to be a one of the most intriguing and challenging problems facing the mankind and natural scientists especially. As we know one of the most brilliant inventions in…
Most early twentieth century relativists --- Lorentz, Einstein, Eddington, for examples --- claimed that general relativity was merely a theory of the aether. We shall confirm this claim by deriving the Einstein equations using aether…
Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity was proposed a little over a hundred years back. It remained a bedrock of twentieth century physics right up to Quantum Field Theory. However, the failure over several decades to provide a unified…
A renormalizable theory of quantum gravity coupled to a dilaton and conformal matter in two space-time dimensions is analyzed. The theory is shown to be exactly solvable classically. Included among the exact classical solutions are…
An exact solution of Einstein's field equations for a point mass surrounded by a static, spherically symmetric fluid of strings is presented. The solution is singular at the origin. Near the string cloud limit there is a $1/r$ correction to…
Starting with Einstein's theory of special relativity and the principle that whenever a celestial body or an elementary particle, subjected only to the fundamental forces of nature, undergoes a change in its kinetic energy then the…
In 1971 Feynman, Kislinger and Ravndal [1] proposed Lorentz-invariant differential equation capable to describe relativistic particle with mass and internal space-time structure. By making use of new variables that differentiate between…
The problem of unification of Gravitation and Electromagnetism in four dimensions; some new ideas involving mixtures of commuting and anti-commuting co-ordinates. Maxwell's equations are extracted in terms of the curvature of the…
The Seebeck effect consists in the induction of a voltage drop due to the temperature difference in a conductor. In the middle of XIXth century, Lord Kelvin has proposed a relation between the Seebeck coefficient and the derivative of the…
A fundamental problem of Einstein's theory of classical general relativity is the existence of singularities such as the big bang. All known laws of physics end at these boundaries of classical space-time. Thanks to recent developments in…
It is shown that quantum vacuum fluctuations give rise to a curvature of space-time of the order appropriate to explain the observed accelerated expansion of the universe. The fact that the fluctuations produce curvature, even if the…
Einstein established the theory of general relativity and the corresponding field equation in 1915 and its vacuum solutions were obtained by Schwarzschild and Kerr for, respectively, static and rotating black holes, in 1916 and 1963,…